In which the pond quadruples its hopes for a huge readership with the important insights of the major Mitchell ...

Sometimes it's best to start off with a joke, and more papal good humour here, in much the same way as hysterical laughter is the only response to the bizarreness of events in the United States, with Fox New's love child blossoming into full-scale fascist demagoguery ... where even the comedians can't crack a joke without being besieged by a Twitter assault ... (the clip isn't region zoned and will play).

But that mention of Twitter also means the pond can turn aside from the hurly burly and seek understanding and insight from perhaps the greatest newspaper editor the world has ever seen, at least in his own humble lunch time ...

The pond is routinely hurt that when the major Mitchell makes his famous Monday appearances at the pond the hits don't immediately quadruple.

But let's face it, you can cast pearls before swine, and sometimes the swine will put on toffy airs and ponce off without benefit of the huge wisdom on offer ...

Indeed, indeed. The pond has long expressed the view that the shift to the Left in the lizard Oz, and the rest of kool aid Murdochian la la land - the Bolter and the Devine are but two notorious examples - is deeply troubling and disturbing.

The pond isn't sure when or why it happened, or how the Left captured the lizard Oz, but it's likely that the increasing role of social media is to blame ...

This sort of insight is exactly why the major Mitchell has over the years garnered so many awards and prizes ...

Oh there will be knocked and doubters, probably of the kind that infest social media. It goes without saying that bloggers are perhaps the worst of the worst.

Look at this statement. It's exactly the sort of careless, unfounded, mind-numbingly stupid sort of comment you'd expect to read in a blog ...

There you go. The major Mitchell has surveyed the 1.3 million or so - and counting - blog posts written today, and spotted a trend ... and naturally the pond is amongst the many that are to the right of mainstream public opinion ...

Damn you, vile Twitterati, how the major Mitchell and the pond hate you with an almost childish, yet deeply passionate and adult hate ...

Meanwhile, the pond thought it should slip in a plug for the illuminati shortly to gather ...

The pond found that at Crikey here, and the pond thought it should mention the way that One Nation is being encouraged and welcomed into the fold by readers of the lizard Oz, because it turns out that Crikey is a serious issue for the major Mitchell, as we talk of activist groups infiltrating what were staid organisations that once deplored a Springbok tour ...

Now young pups wouldn't remember the days when sceptical, hard-bitten news editors of the major Mitchell kind would apply the sniff test - by golly, how well that test worked in uncovering dangerous historian Manning Clarke as a Soviet mole, long before the Donald decided the Ruskies and Putin were the good guys.

It went this way ... hi, I'm major Mitchell and I cover the doings of devious leftists for the Currish Snail daily ... stories start in many different ways ... dum dah, dum dah ... dum dum...

More exciting Randy Stone here, and damn you media leftists for distracting from the major Mitchell's meandering maudlin memories of the good old days ...

What we need is some decent hard-bitten, hard-boiled eggy insights ...

I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

There ain't no clean way to make a hundred million bucks.... Somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut out from under them... Decent people lost their jobs.... Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It's the system.

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring. 

Oh stop it, because it's way past time to give Crikey that well-deserved major Mitchell serve for trying to move with the times ... so let's just do the last gobbet of astonishing insights in one big gulp ...

Surely this is a classic ...

Once the mission of the Left media was to encourage government to give a hand up to the less educated and less fortunate. Now it is to encourage feelings of moral superiority among the middle class over the working classes who are derided for enjoying activities such as racing greyhounds.

Yes, it's got nothing to do with the slaughter of animals, and long may the slaughter continue ... and while we're at it, can we please bring back bear-baiting, a simple and enjoyable pleasure ... and can someone explain why cock-fighting was banned?

Yes, that final insight is tremendous.

What better way to keep in touch with the barking mad family of reptiles who have made One Nation and the Donald what they are today. What a simple way to elevate your mind, in 140 characters, or many, many more, harping relentlessly on the same theme - the election was rigged, democracy is broken - and so see a demagogue surge to power on the back of spineless reporting imagining that some counterfeit balance is a way to deal with lies ...

Ys, congregate with the like-minded and thoughtful (or not) people in Murdoch la la land, and make sure to thoroughly enjoy the kool aid.

No correspondence please, as the immortal Raymond Chandler, already quoted on this page, once said ...

When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.

And so to Rowe taking a look at where Fox News and Murdochracy has taken the United States ... and more Rowe here ...